Fighting against cigarette smuggling is of great significance. Cigarette smuggling is considered to be the second largest smuggling activity after drugs. In recent ten years, although every country takes an active part in fighting against cigarette smuggling, a number of smuggled cigarettes still has a trend to increase. In 1996, smuggled cigarettes account for 6.5% of total sales of cigarettes. In 2009, this number increases to 11.6%, i.e., a number of the cigarettes reaches 675 billion, which causes a loss of 400 billion dollars to various national governments. Further, the harm of cigarette smuggling is embodied not only in threat of human health and loss of government revenue, but also in provision of capital sources to criminal organizations and terrorist organizations and even provision of expenditure for cigarette smuggling. The European Union even declares that all international criminal organizations are suspected to take part in cigarette smuggling. The harm of cigarette smuggling is increasing, which reflects that the related detection measures are not in place, which creates opportunities for criminals.
Currently, there is lack of active measures to detect cigarette smuggling internationally. Although various types of barcodes, watermarks or the like are frequently used for cigarettes, such measures are difficult to achieve effective inspection when the cigarettes are in transit, which brings little effect. According to researches, cigarette smuggling is primarily implemented by transporting a large amount of cigarettes through containers. Radiation imaging is implemented on goods, luggage or the like to achieve perspective imaging, so as to achieve a purpose of non-invasion inspection. Currently, radiation imaging has been widely applied in places such as airports, customs, stations, places for large gathering or the like, and is the most important measure in the field of security inspection of prohibited goods. In the process of inspection of containers, although images of goods in the containers have been obtained, there are a wide variety of types of goods, image judgers have uneven experiences, and probabilities that smuggled goods occur are relatively low, which results in barely satisfactory manual judgment results.
In recent years, with the rapid development of related subjects such as mode recognition, image processing or the like, automatic detection of prohibited goods becomes the focus of attention in the industry and academic circle. However, currently, there are few related literatures concerning automatic detection in Digital Radiography (DR) images of large-scale containers. In view of influences due to many factors such as imaging measures, application fields, data sources or the like, researches are typically made on small-scale luggage security inspection devices, for example, dual-energy DR, Computed Tomography (CT) or the like. Particularly, automatic detection of explosives and guns gets more attention from researchers due to being directly related to aviation safety. There is currently no specific published literature in the particular field of cigarette smuggling.
Object detection is currently a hot topic in the fields of computer vision, mode recognition or the like. With the development of image retrieval, there have been presented many referential research results. Particularly, with the occurrence of Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features, Deformable Part-based Model (DPM) algorithm, Deep Learning method or the like, the effects of object detection are significantly improved. In view of related researches, specific researches are made on a cigarette model in a radiation image in the present disclosure, and a better effect is obtained.